Aligning trillions of dollars of capital with the transition to a clean-energy economy is generating a youth movement in the field of sustainable finance.
Academic research on climate and finance is crawing younger researchers, a paper by Matteo Gasparini, a doctoral student at the University of Oxford, and Peter Tufano, a professor at Harvard Business School, finds.
More than 70% of academic research into climate finance published as of mid-2022 came from postdoctoral students and other academics early in their research careers, according to their review, which examined 500 journal articles as of mid-2022.
“The encouraging signs are that research on climate and finance is increasing, in a global, inclusive and young fashion,” they write.
The insight comes as the world on Wednesday marks the United Nations’ International Day of Education, the sixth anniversary of a day that has evolved into an annual recognition of the critical role of learning in building a more sustainable society.
New initiatives
Education is at the core of the MSCI Sustainability Institute, which is developing initiatives aimed at supporting a new generation of scholarship into the intersection of climate and capital. They include:
- Our Climate Scholars Program, which enables master’s students to study emerging areas in climate finance with the goal of developing new types of models and analytics.
- Our Climate Data Knowledge Program, which will equip academic researchers with institutional-grade data and models to support independent research into sustainability questions faced by practitioners.
The opportunity and challenge of ending the threat of climate change will increasingly fall on the next generation. It is this new generation who will create new knowledge and solutions to guide capital to do what it can do best, which is to drive the creation of sustainable value over time.
